Thursday, May 14, 2015

Quality of education sustain economy

教育素质牵制经济

It
is always every country’s dream to become developed country. However, the
context of “developed” often been measured narrowly with “high income” as main
and maybe, the only focus. Economic progress merely through rise in income is
just considered as “economic growth”, not “development”. The context of
“development” goes beyond income targets such as education, environment, human
rights and so on.

Luckily,
achieving high income or specifically, GNI per capita of USD15,000 by 2020 is only
one of Malaysia’s Economic Transformation Program (ETP) many targets. Besides
focusing on income growth, serious attention also needs to be given,
particularly to education aspect. Quality education can improve productivity
and ensure adequate supply of skill labors.

Recent Development: University
Ranking

Recently,
Malaysia has again ranked out of Asia Top 100 in Times Higher Education’s world
universities ranking for 2014. University of Tokyo (Japan) gets top rank.
National University of Singapore (NUS) ranked second. Nanyang Technological
University, another Singapore university, ranked highly at 11th
place. Universities from India, Saudi Arabia, Labanon, Iran and Thailand also
have representatives in Asian Top 100.

National
University of Singapore was formed out of University Malaya (UM) when Singapore
got independent from Malaysia. Therefore, it is unacceptable to see Singapore
counterpart consistently being among top university in Asia and the world while
none of Malaysian university comes close to that standard.

Does
high education standard in Singapore relative to Malaysia explains the economic
disparity between both countries?

Education, Total Factor
Productivity (TFP) and Income

To
achieve high income nation, Malaysia needs talents. Quality education can
produces talents, skill labors and therefore, helps improve total factor
productivity (TFP). A brief analysis on relationship between TFP and income per
worker reveals a positive relationship for both Malaysia (see Figure 1) and
Singapore (Figure 2). Data for both Figure 1 and Figure 2 are sourced from
Anders Isaksson (2007) study for United Nations Industrial Development
Organization (UNIDO). Both figures imply that increasing productivity can
increase income and thus, boost economic growth. However, to increase
productivity, quantity and quality of education (not just quantity alone) are
important.

Figure
1: Malaysia’s TFP and Income Relationship

Figure
2: Singapore’s TFP and Income Relationship

Malaysia
and Singapore both provide lots of education opportunity for its citizen. Table
1 shows Malaysia’s latest adults’ literacy rate is very high at 93.1%. This is
higher than the world (average) literacy rate of 84.1%. Malaysia’s literacy
rate improves 23.6 percentage point since about 20 years ago implies a
remarkable expansion of education opportunity to its citizen. Among the
selected Asian countries (selection depending on data availability), Singapore
top the group at 95.9%. Despite
relatively low literacy rate, India has 10 universities in Asia Top 100
ranking, implying their quality of education. Will Malaysia economic progress
faster if we have better quality of education? If we take Singapore as an
example, the answer could be a “yes”.

Table 1: Adult (15+)
Total Literacy Rate (%)

Country

1979 - 1985

2010 - 2011

Changes

Singapore

82.9

95.9

13.0

Philippines

83.3

95.4

12.1

Thailand

88.0

93.5

5.5

Vietnam

83.8

93.4

9.5

MALAYSIA

69.5

93.1

23.6

Myanmar

78.6

92.7

14.1

Indonesia

67.3

92.8

25.5

India

40.8

62.8

22.0

World

75.6

84.1

8.4

Source: World Bank database

Figure
3 and Figure 4 show a relative higher TFP (measure in relative to the United
States’ TFP) and income per worker for Singapore as compare to Malaysia. Both
figures show a worrying trend where gaps between Malaysia and Singapore are
widening over time in term of TFP and also income per worker. Furthermore,
Malaysia’s TFP was only half of United States’ TFP most of the years from 1961
to 1990. The graphs as in Figure 3 did not show much encouraging trend for
improvement for near future too. In contrast, Singapore’s TFP did reach as high
as 90% of the United States before declining back to about 80% level. Widening
gaps of Malaysia-Singapore education quality could be the cause for economic
disparity between the two countries. Thus, improving quality (not quantity) of
Malaysia’s education may help improve our economy.

Figure
3: TFP Comparison - Malaysia vs. Singapore

Figure
4: Income per Worker Comparison - Malaysia vs. Singapore

Education and
Malaysian Economic

“Higher
education attainment yield higher salary” – that is what parent usually tell
their children to encourage them to study hard. On Malaysia’s macroeconomic
perspective, that statement may have its truth.

States
analysis

Table
2 shows top six states with highest gross domestic products (GDP) per capita in
2012 also have higher workforce with tertiary education. Exception is Sarawak. Sarawak
comes second in term of GDP per capita but only 18.5% of its labor forces have
tertiary education. This is due to high revenue from Petroleum and logging
sectors that boots Sarawak’s wealth. Kuala Lumpur has highest GDP per capita
and also highest percentage of labor forces with tertiary education. Other top
income states with high tertiary educated labor forces are Labuan, Pulau
Pinang, Selangor and Melaka.

On
the lower income states, Terengganu and Kelantan have relative high percentage
of tertiary educated labor. Perhaps, many of those state-born residents are
working at other states like Kuala Lumpur and Selangor yet still registered
under their home-state. A graphical representation on percentage of tertiary
education labor versus GDP per capita is presented in Figure 5.

Education
has been a big industry in Malaysia despite the drop of quality in
international comparison standard. Revenue from education services amounted to
only about RM 25 million in year 1972 but rose a magnificent 39,553% to about
RM10 billion in 2010 (see Table 3). Salaries and wages paid also increase
dramatically from about RM15 million in 1972 to RM53 million in 1981, RM 148
million and then RM3 billion in 2010. In year 2010, numbers of people engaged
in education sector are estimated as 107,939 persons. Value of fixed assets
owned associated to education services are about RM8.9 billion.

Table
3: Education Industry in Malaysia

Year

Revenue

(RM mil)

Salaries
& wages paid

(RM mil)

Number
of person engaged

Value of Fixed Assets
Owned

(RM mil)

1972

25.237

15.273

6145

28.937

1981

104.429

53.299

12462

91.593

1990

304.048

147.831

22812

274.343

2010

10,007.309

3165.553

107,939

8,933.593

Changes

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

1972 – 2010

39,553.3

20,626.5

1,656.5

30,772.6

1981 – 2010

9,482.9

5,839.2

766.1

9,653.6

1990 - 2010

3,191.4

2,041.3

373.2

3,156.4

Source:
Malaysia’s Statistical Department

Suggested
Improvement

In one of my co-authored journal article, we have
highlighted few area of concerned about Malaysian education services. First is death of dialectic.Despite loud calls for lifelong learning in Malaysia, capitalist wave
have transformed the fundamental of education from empowering the minds
(thinking) to manufacturing employees for contemporary labour usage. Therefore,
Malaysian present education system has changed from the argumentative culture
to indoctrination culture which does not
improve productivity. Excessive exams that act as a ‘quality control’ check on the potential
employees are the culprit. Thus, a system of education that
reduces examination, gives freedom for dialectic and encourages argumentation
is needed.

Second is the slavery of market-driven education. Education has evolved into what Theodor Adorno called as Kulturindustrie (Cultural Industry). Kulturindustrie
is a term used to describe a culture (including education) that has been turned
into an industry commodity, producing and selling worldwide according to the
rules of the capitalist market, which are profit maximization. Thus, the following five directions of education are heavily influenced
by those capitalist market rules: (a) undermining of the importance of non-pragmatic and
non-market-driven subjects, which are
important to improve thinking; (b) rapid increases of sub-standard educations; (c) immortalizes the
students as “King Consumer”; (d)preferring ‘Teacher’ academician than ‘Thinker’ academician (e) from free public education system
towards paid private education. Therefore, commercialization
of education services should be done with care for its quality, not merely
expanding its quantity.

Third is administrators’
hegemony-cum-syndrome of
pseudo-professors. In our current education, academic achievement has been so much
bureaucratized. Empowering bureaucrats over
academician may have causes office politic that retards our academic excellence. Thus, let us go back to the very basic. Just let our academicians do their
research, write and publish freely i.e. focus on their core-business. Give them
less non-academic stuffs, less non-productive meetings and less politicking.
Anyway, at the end of the day, it is the number of good quality works that
count internationally and not the number of committees that they represented,
not how many non-publishable reports that they have produced and not how many
meetings that they have already attended.

Conclusion

Good quality of
education is as important (if not more) than quantity of education. Quantity of
education (mushrooming of new education institutions from pre-school to higher
learning level) may contribute to national output. However, together with
quality of education industry only sustainable growth can be achieved.

[Chinese version published at Nanyang Press, 7th July 2014. Available online at http://www.nanyang.com/node/633343. This English version may be slightly different from the Chinese online/printed newspaper version]

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